But BMD isn't supposed to be a massive attack, it's supposed to be a rogue nation, half dozen warheads
Putin agrees with you. And he ain't worried:
"Each state decides what to do and how," he said. "Theoretically, it is possible. But in practice,
Russia is not planning joint actions in this sphere with other states, including China. Russia at
present has enough strength and resources of its own to react to any change in international
and strategic stability."
With about 6,000 nuclear warheads, Russia can easily overwhelm any missile shield that the
United States might conceivably construct. But China is believed to possess fewer than 400
warheads, the vast majority mounted on planes and artillery rather than missiles, and Beijing
has denounced the American proposal as a direct threat to its security.
And his Chinese "allies" are swinging in the wind.
nytimes.com
July 18, 2001
Putin Says Russia Won't Join China in Countering U.S.
Shield
By MICHAEL WINES
OSCOW, July 18 — President Vladimir V. Putin
used his first formal news conference today to
temper Russian criticism of Washington's plans
for a limited missile defense, saying Moscow would not
act jointly with China to counter an American missile
shield should it be built.
Mr. Putin also expressed muted hope that he could reach
some accord with the White House on such a defense. He
said he and President Bush were building a close
relationship that could prove crucial in talks over how to
deploy a missile shield without abandoning decades of
arms-control agreements.
Mr. Putin's remarks came two days after he and China's
president, Jiang Zemin, signed a widely publicized agreement committing both nations to a
range of foreign-policy positions, led by opposition to changes in the 1972 Antiballistic
Missile Treaty.
The treaty explicitly prohibits the type of missile defense that the White House is
contemplating, and Russian commentators have cast the Russia-China agreement as the
cornerstone of a new alliance against American influence in Eurasia.
At least with regard to the United States' plans for a missile defense, Mr. Putin seemed to say
today, that is not true.
"Each state decides what to do and how," he said. "Theoretically, it is possible. But in practice,
Russia is not planning joint actions in this sphere with other states, including China. Russia at
present has enough strength and resources of its own to react to any change in international
and strategic stability."
With about 6,000 nuclear warheads, Russia can easily overwhelm any missile shield that the
United States might conceivably construct. But China is believed to possess fewer than 400
warheads, the vast majority mounted on planes and artillery rather than missiles, and Beijing
has denounced the American proposal as a direct threat to its security.
While both governments have warned that the White House proposal could set off a new arms
race, forcing them to drastically expand or upgrade their missile arsenals, Mr. Putin staked out a
position today that differs from that of the Chinese.
Asked to describe conditions under which Russia and the United States might negotiate
changes in the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, he said Russia would be guided first by its national
security interests.
But he added that any decision would also be based on the degree to which the treaty could be
altered without upsetting existing international arms-control regimes.
He also said his emerging relationship with Mr. Bush could play a key role in those
discussions.
"I think that personal relations between leaders of such countries as the United States and
Russia are very important, at least because we have accumulated the biggest amount of nuclear
weapons," he said. "This is why I assess positively the fact that normal personal relations are
taking shape with the president."
Mr. Putin took pains to praise Mr. Bush as both a competent leader and as a man who is
sincere and even sentimental man — qualities that the Russian president said he admires. "All
this is a very good basis for building personal relations and trying to find solutions to
complicated issues which we have not yet solved," he said.
Bruce G. Blair, a nuclear-strategy expert at the Center for Defense Information in Washington,
said Mr. Putin's remarks make it clear that the strategic alliance between Russia and China is
but a shallow one.
"Putin clearly is resigned to some program going forward" to build a missile shield, Mr. Blair
said, "and he wants to limit the damage to the relationship between our two countries and find
a compromise. He doesn't want to have to represent China's position in this as well."
The missile-shield debate consumed only a bit of Mr. Putin's wide-ranging news conference,
his first major broadcast appearance before the press since he took office in January 2000.
With no small amount of wit — and once, with ill-disguised anger — he fielded more than a
score of questions from about 500 Russian and foreign reporters seated in the balconied
Kremlin auditorium that once housed sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.
For much of the 90-minute session, Mr. Putin hammered home what he said were his
unshakable commitments to democracy and free markets, the two main prerequisites for
Russia's continued membership in the Group of 8 large industrialized nations.
Mr. Putin will attend the Group of 8 summit meeting in Genoa, Italy, this week, and his news
conference was aimed in part at getting that message out before he meets Mr. Bush and other
leaders on Friday.
Responding to a reporter's query about a depression in the military shipbuilding industry in
Arkhangelsk, an Arctic military town, Mr. Putin refused to promise better times or even to offer
much sympathy. Instead, he said that inflated military spending had driven the Soviet Union
toward bankruptcy and led to political chaos, and that he did not intend to repeat that mistake.
He argued that Russia's new tax policies, including a 13 percent flat income tax and restructured
corporate taxes, compared favorably to those in in Europe and North America. He praised
Russia's parliament for its passage this summer of a land-reform law and other legal codes that
he called the basis of a civil society.
He suggested that the Communist Party was headed for oblivion unless it accepted Russia's
new economic reality, and he said he was committed to building a nation in which voters
choose leaders on the basis of party affiliation and ideology, and not on charisma.
The one sour note involved Chechnya, where Mr. Putin's initial efforts to put down an Islamic
rebellion in 1999 have devolved into a twilight war in which both sides stand accused of war
crimes against civilians and needless brutality against enemy soldiers.
Here, Mr. Putin heatedly rejected the suggestion, widely accepted elsewhere, that Russian
troops have systematically looted Chechen villages and tortured and murdered civilian
Chechen men of military age.
"Prior to 1999, there was utter chaos in the Chechen Republic — shooting of people in the
squares and the decapitation of people. And thank God, or thank Allah, we have put an end to
that. At least you should thank us for it," he told one journalist.
Mr., Putin explicitly rejected charges that Russian soldiers had looted the Chechen towns of
Assinovskaya and Sernovodsk earlier this month and tortured the towns' male residents.
Reports of military abuses in those towns prompted an admission by the Russian army —
since retracted — that its soldiers had probably broken the law.
Today, Mr. Putin said those operations "essentially are aimed at checking the passports and
identifying the people who are on the federal wanted list" of Chechen rebels and terrorists.
And he said it was difficult for Russian authorities to avoid being "provoked" by the militants
into crackdowns on villagers.
News conferences like the one held today are not unheard of in the new Russia — President
Boris N. Yeltsin held at least one, in 1993 — but there is no tradition here of impromptu
exchanges between leaders and the press. Despite the flare-up over Chechnya, Mr. Putin
seemed to hold his own, and even draw a a few guffaws from his questioners.
Told by one reporter that his negotiation of border disputes with China was an object of envy,
Mr. Putin shot back: 'Are you envying China? or are you envying Russia?"
And when another reporter asked why Mr. Putin is occasionally spied in the company of a
black puppy when all Russians know that the Putin family dog is a white poodle, the president
deadpanned: "We dyed it. She's a girl, and she dyed her own hair."
In fact, the black pup, a Labrador, is a recent gift from Russia's emergencies ministry, which
employs labs as rescue dogs. |
